Not all isopods are created equal. The dwarf tropical (white or Costa Rican purple) are the most harmless but I wouldn’t trust the larger species. I used to keep juvenile P scaber in with my whip scorpions until the day I dropped in some pinhead crickets and saw an isopod grab a living cricket...
Well if I find and photograph any Tarantulas while I’m there in May hopefully you wouldn’t mind sending me a link to that paper? I’ll let you know and will post some photos on the forum as well.
That’s great! Did you end up getting any leads elsewhere or just managed to figure it out? I can’t say I was familiar with that genus but it sure looking fitting for the ones you saw.
That's been my dilemma so far when it comes to field guides or resources for Central America. There are some good ones for insects but none cover arachnids at all. You can try using iNaturalist.org and searching by location like in the link below.
La Selva is interesting because you can stay...
Very cool. Did you find them active on the surface or did you have to tease them out? There are at least 3-4 species of Aphonopelma in Costa Rica and surely some other lesser known genera as well. Did you go to La Selva Biological Station as part of your trip?
I am headed back in May for...
Are there any good field guides that include the arachnids of tropical Latin America? I recently picked up Insects and other Arthropods of Tropical America but it is more an introductory text and I am hoping to get a field guide for Central America. So far can only find one but it completely...
I would eat one if I were in an area where they were consumed and one was offered to me. I wouldn’t ever eat an animal that died, and I recoiled at the thought of a romanticized view of ritualized cannabalism. I’m just guessing that you’re not familiar with Prion diseases? Tribal groups in...
IKEA billy bookcase with optional glass doors. Perfect place for my Amblypygi and Tarantulas. Harder to accommodate if you keep larger species but you can still fit quite a few larger enclosures, especially if you get the full glass and not the half glass doors like I did. I have 2 other...
I think that people tend to associate arid areas with sand and that's just not always accurate. Arid areas can be grasslands, scrub or savanna, or topical dry forest, or deserts. They do not need to be sandy at all but in some habitats sand may be a component of the soil. Tarantulas aren't...
Quite a few springtail species raft together like that when they breed in standing water. If you have a healthy population of them in an enclosure you’ll see this often.
Clarify. Did you feed them ripe tomatoe fruit or the leaves? If it was the fruit then there is nothing to worry about. The toxic alkaloids are in the green parts of the plant.
Excellent suggestions. Thanks for the help. I probably should have opted for a better quality macro lens but even that one felt like a nice jump up from the terrible diopter lenses I had from years ago. I had to get a new camera body after more than a decade of use from my first Canon DSLR so...
Thanks for the suggestions. Right now I have the Oshiro 60mm f/2.8 2:1 LD UNC Ultra-Macro Lens plus that Raynox DCR-250 I mentioned. I also have a Opteka Pro E-TTL Auto-Focus Dedicated Flash and an articulating arm or a extra tripod I can use but I have no real experience using them yet. I...
Sometimes I think people just want a reason to use some of their tired old jokes. The entire “kill it with fire” or “time to burn down the house” jokes are just old and past their prime. You could turn the tables or just remind them that they aren’t actally funny or clever.
I agree that they seem to prefer tight spaces between flat slabs of vertical cork. I also tend to lay a piece of cork flat on the substrate that offers a hiding place underneath, mostly for smaller species or young ones and they tend to use those areas a lot.
I’ve never really seen much...
So far my only arboreals are Tapinauchenius violaceus and Pseudoclamoris gigas. The P gigas is still a sling (about 1”) but it seems a bit more feisty than my T violaceus and visually it’s more appealing as far as markings and changes in its appearance as it grows. I like that mine are both...
Absolutely. There are at least a dozen Nepenthes and several Pinguicula in there but she seems to navigate them safely. I have thought about moving her to one of my snake vivariums as they would be a lot safer than living with carnivorous plants.
It can help a lot to investigate the etymology of species names too. Auratus means gold/golden. The etymology of cancerides is a bit more interesting. In Latin Cancer is the word for crab and the suffix ides means son of or descendant of, so the species names cancerides means son of the crab...
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